For the 15th consecutive year, identity theft topped the Federal Trade Commission’s list of top consumer complaints. But its reign could be coming to an end following a significant increase in the number of scams in which con artists impersonating government agents and law enforcement personnel part consumers from their money.[More]

Are fraudulent tax returns the fault of the IRS, or caused by a weakness in the most popular software programs that consumers use to file their taxes? Former employees of Intuit, maker of TurboTax, allege that the company prevented security staff from flagging and shutting down obviously fraudulent accounts. Why? Market share. Fraudsters were ditching TurboTax and using other tax software when the company flagged their returns. [More]

Customers at a Morrisons grocery store in the United Kingdom received an exciting surprise if they went to take some money out of the store’s cash machine: it was paying out double. No, this is not a thing that was actually supposed to happen, but customers rushed to the store to take out some extra money…even though it would be fairly easy for the ATM owner and their banks to determine who had taken out more cash than they were entitled to. [More]

Each tax season fraudsters manage to separate taxpayers from billions of dollars by using aggressive schemes such as impersonating Internal Revenue Service agents or employing emails and websites designed to gather consumers’ personal information for fraudulent use. This year, the IRS has issued a list of the “Dirty Dozen” scams consumers should guard against. [More]

If you’re an Ohio resident and you’re expecting a refund on your state taxes this spring, you might have to go online and take a personalized “quiz” in order to prove you are who you claim to be before you can get your money. [More]

Only weeks after Internal Revenue Service officials announced that more than 290,000 consumers have fallen victim to an ongoing back taxes scam in the last 15 months, alert employees at a Safeway supermarket in Washington prevented a woman from being added to the list of victims. [More]

Let’s be honest for a moment and acknowledge that not everyone is 100% honest or accurate when filing their tax returns. There are lots of people out there who wouldn’t be shocked to hear from the IRS that they owe more or didn’t pay enough, which is why thousands of Americans have been scammed out of millions of dollars by con artists pretending to represent the IRS. [More]

“Make sure that someone owns the apartment they’re making available for rent” seems like a completely batty consumer warning, but unfortunately it is also a necessary one. People in Sacramento say that they handed hundreds of dollars each over to a woman advertising rooms for rent on Craigslist, only to discover that she’d rented the same space out to multiple people, and didn’t own it in the first place. [More]

No, Betty White is not dead (and neither is Eddie Murphy, Celine Dion, Jon Bon Jovi, etc). No, a bunch of worms didn’t burst out of a woman’s chest. But because your friends on Facebook are easily fooled and don’t know about the existence of Snopes.com, it’s up to you to run through that gauntlet of idiocy on your news feed. Since those gullible folks will never learn, Facebook says now it’s going to help crack down on bogus, hoax and otherwise fake Internet stories clogging up what you read on the social media site. [More]

Last summer, we told you about a former employee at Delta and Northwest airlines who, along with a partner, duped the companies out of millions of dollars by submitting and paying invoices to a bogus company. That partner was recently sentenced to 10 years behind bars and now must turn over all the fun toys he bought with the ill-gotten money. [More]

In the coming weeks, some retailers will be offering deals on unsold stock of popular holiday gift items. Sometimes stores are up-front about whether or not a particular product was previously purchased and returned, while many just put these items back into inventory with the truly new stuff. That’s why you need to open up those boxes before you leave the store — or else risk getting home to find you’ve purchased a box of rocks. [More]

Student loan borrowers have enough to worry about, so they shouldn’t have to deal with being hounded by so-called debt relief companies promising to provide consumers with repayment benefits that actually come free of charge with federal loans. Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau took action to put a stop to two such relief scams that reaped millions of dollars from thousands of consumers. [More]

Let’s say you’re a criminal who has just purchased a bunch of credit/debit card numbers stolen from one of the data breaches that occur every day. How do you check to see if the numbers you’ve purchased are any good? For ID thieves in Brooklyn, the Domino’s Pizza ordering app provided a quick and easy way to run through those numbers — and get pizza for people. [More]

Emails for free pizza might be few and far between, so when one shows up in your inbox you might be tempted to ditch those dinner plans for a few cheesy slices. But even the promise of free pizzas can be too good to be true, that was certainly the case this week when an email purported to be from Pizza Hut didn’t end in free pizza, but dangerous malware. [More]